Oh Eight

Today is the last day of the year. I'm a little bit of a reflective person, I guess. I always like the end of things, because I think it's fun to be able to think about how things used to be and what's happened since then and how stuff has changed and where everything is going. For example, at the end of a sports season, I love when they show the montage videos of all the different big plays from the year. And so, as 2008 comes to a close, I think it's somewhat important to look back on what the year has brought. However, I guess each year means different things to different people, so what defines 2008 for me is obviously going to be different that what it was to you. And since I am only myself, I can only write intelligently write about my own life. So I might be the only one who cares about anything that follows, but that's okay. They say writing is therapeutic. And I'm in pretty bad shape, so I probably need all the therapy I can get.

One thing that I'll remember about 2008 are all the little random trips that I went on. Outside of the summer, I didn't go anywhere too crazy, but there were a few new experiences that were interesting enough. For example, there were the two trips to Tulsa: to help at CIY Believe in February and to go to the National Missionary Convention in November. Or there was my trip to Buffalo NY over spring break (and an afternoon trek into Canada, eh?). Or there was the October pilgrimage to Albuquerque, where I got to see all kinds of balloons and have kind of crazy reaction to a big burrito.

2008 was also a year of personal records. For example, I think I attended three weddings, which I imagine is the most I've ever done. I also went to Starbucks four times, which is the most I ever have in year (Because I really don't like coffee that much). I also think I probably logged more miles on the road traveling from place to place than any other year of my life. So Michael Phelps and I will both remember this last year for our record-breaking performances.

Unfortunately, I may remember 2008 for certain periods of intense physical pain. Last May, I was enjoying a nice, friendly game of softball with some of my fellow Ozark students. Everyone was having a great time. After I hit another crushing line drive to the outfield, I was standing on first base. When the next batter hit a ground ball up the middle, I took off for second. Ryan Hicks, who was playing shortstop, scooped up the ball and hurled it to first. Unfortunately for me, I happened to be in between him and the ball's destination, and it slammed into my left side, creating an instant welt. (There's pictures on facebook. It's actually pretty cool looking). At the time, I believed that was the worst pain I had ever felt before. And then December came. I was in the gym playing a game of pickup basketball that came down to the wire. I was guarding Charlie Landis, and even though he's not very good, I figured I should guard him pretty close just in case. He received a pass and looked like he was about to put up a game-winning three-pointer, so I jumped to block it. Much to my dismay, he did not actually shoot the ball, but dribbled to my right. When I landed from my leap and attempted to change direction to get back in front of him, my body decided that would be fine time to stop supporting itself, and I tumbled to the floor. After painfully hobbling around campus for a few days, I learned that I had a torn meniscus in my knee. And that, my friends, is not much fun. (Here's the irony: Not long before that softball game, Ryan Hicks broke a rib and punctured a lung, which I occasionally made fun of him for. In return, he nearly broke my rib by targeting me with the softball. In high school, Charlie tore his ACL, which I also made fun of from time to time, three years later he took his revenge and gave me a knee injury. Lesson learned: don't make fun of people when they're down, because they will mess you up.)

A big change in my life came in October, when my sister got married. I've already written all about that, so I won't go into it much here. But thankfully, things there have not really changed negatively, and we're still tight and I have a pretty excellent new brother-in-law. It does mean I have to buy one more present at Christmastime, but I guess I can live with that.

2008 also marks the founding of "A Chicken in a Cage with a Ferret"! And I'm confident that w'ere all grateful for that.

Probably the most significant experience in my life in 2008 was the summer, when I worked on Ozark's camp teams. Again, I've already written about all that, so you can check out my posts from July and August if you want. But being on camp teams was definitely one of the best things I have ever done. I learned a ton about God and ministry, I got to travel to some new places that I liked a lot, I met a bunch of awesome people all over the country, and I made some phenomenal friends.

So that's 2008. Of course, there's all kinds of other things scattered in there. The basketball and baseball games and the concerts and the Waffle House experience and the Chick-fil-A and Spangles trips and the Nertz games and everything else. It was a good year. Often frustrating, but also often awesome. It'll be nice to see what 2009 brings. I'll be turning 21, so I guess it's about time I grew up one of these days. And I'll hopefully be doing some type of internship this summer, and with luck I won't discover that I can't hack it in ministry. I look forward to making new friends and strengthening relationships with current friends and growing closer to God.

However, it's hard to be very confident about any New Year that will begin with me hanging out with the Landises.

The Night the World Changed

Right now, "I Celebrate the Day" by Relient K should be playing on your computer. I hope you listen to it. But in case you, like me, have a computer that has malfunctioning sound, I'll put the words of this song here:

And with this Christmas wish is missed
The point I could convey
If only I could find the words to say
To let you know how much you've touched my life
Because here is where you're finding me
In the exact same place as New Year's Eve
And from the lack of my persistency
We're less than half as close as I want to be

And the first time that you opened your eyes
Did you realize that you would be my Savior?
And the first breath that left your lips
Did you know that it would change this world forever?

And so this Christmas I'll compare
The things I've felt in prior years
To what this midnight made so clear
That you have come to meet me here

To look back, and think that
This baby would one day save me
In that hope that what you did
That you were born so I might really live
To look back, and think that this baby would one day save me

And I, I celebrate the day
That you were born to die
So I could one day pray for you to save my life

I absolutely love this song. It states so simply, yet so beautifully, what Christmas is all about. At Christmastime, we get so wrapped up with all kinds of things, like presents, travel, ham, family, gingerbread houses, TV specials, lights, and on and on and on. And most of those things aren't at all bad in themselves. But that's not what Christmas is. Christmas is all focused on Jesus. And so, as Christians, we keep Jesus in Christmas by singing "Happy Birthday Jesus" or by going to church on Christmas Eve and reading the nativity story. And then we got on with the rest of our holiday.

I don't think that we really understand just how huge the Jesus-event is. Everything from his birth to life and ministry to death and resurrection. It's what the world is all about. It is THE point of everything. And we forget this, not just on Christmas, but all the time. Every day, I spend so much time, energy, and thought on classes and sports and girls and bum knees and all kinds of other things. And I think THAT'S all what life is about. But that's not even close. I wig out about all these little things, all the while neglecting the big thing.

It's an incredible thought. All of history, all of existence, comes down to Jesus. The entire universe centered around God enfleshed, lying in a manger in a tiny village. And it changed the world forever. That baby died for me and lives in me, and I will live with him forever. That's the bottom line of the story. That's what it's all about. That's what everything's about. All this other nonsense that eats up my attention fades when compared to Christ.

Merry Christmas. I hope you all get everything that you want, and that you have a great day with family and friends. But I especially hope that you remember Christ, not just today, but all the time. Celebrate the day every day.

In The Dust

A couple years ago, I went to my grandparents' house in Ohio for Thanksgiving. At the time, my grandma was suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease. As far as I can understand it, this is a disease of the nervous system where the body shuts down bit by bit. By the time I got there that November, my grandma couldn't walk or anything. My grandpa would pick her up from her bed every morning and put her in her chair, where she'd sit till he put her back in bed at night. Also, since she couldn't control all the muscles and stuff in her throat the right way, it was really hard for her to talk, and she could hardly eat anything. So she got really, really tiny, pretty much just skin and bones. It was evident when I was there that she wasn't going to make it much longer.

On Thanksgiving, my grandma started getting a little upset after dinner. I imagine it was because she knew this was the last time she would see me and my cousins all together at once. I remember after dinner, she just began to cry and cry and cry, and the sobs wracked her small, weakened frame. And I wasn't sure how to react. She was one of the kindest, most loving people I have ever met. It wasn't fair for her to suffer like this. To undergo such a slow, painful death and have to be so, so sad.

That night I was reading a chapter of Lamentations. Lamentations is written by Jeremiah and is all about the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. And that night, as I was filled with such sadness, frustrated by all the crappy things that I could nothing about, I came across Lamentations 3:28-32:

Let him sit alone in silence, for the Lord has laid it on him. Let him bury his face in the dust--there may yet be hope. Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him, and let him be filled with disgrace. For men are not cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love.

Here's what struck me about this passage. Jeremiah is watching his homeland being demolished and his friends and countrymen being dragged off as captives to Babylon. And what he essentially says in the first bit of this is, "Be sad!" So often as Christians, we think, "There's no room for sadness in my life! I'm supposed to be filled with joy! I need to look peppy and happy all the time, or there must be something wrong with my faith!" So when something truly bad happens, our solution is to push our real emotions beneath the surface, keep our chin up, and act like everything is A-OK. But that's not how Jeremiah reacts. He laments. He sits in silence and buries his face in the dirt. He's upset, and he expresses it.

Crappy things happen, and they suck and they're worth getting upset about. Grandmothers get sick. Parents get divorced. Fathers lose their jobs. Kids are taken captive as slaves in Asia. Relationships fall apart. AIDS rips through a continent. Mothers die.

Jerusalem gets destroyed.

So be sad. When these things happen, we don't have to pretend that it bounces off our denial-plated armor. Cry. Punch your pillow. Strum your guitar till blisters cover your fingers. Open your window and shout at the clouds. When crap happens, by all means, by sad.

But don't despair. That's where the difference is. Lamentations is all about being sad. It's about weeping and crying out at the bad things that happen. But it's not about hopelessness. Sorrow lasts for a time. We need to remember that in the midst of our sadness, God is there. When we fall facedown in the mud, he's ready to pick us back up. "For men are not cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love." God is there in our sorrow. And he's there in our happiness. While circumstances aren't constant, while our emotions definitely aren't constant, he is constant. It's okay to be upset at the right things and to express that emotion. But we shouldn't remain there. We need to allow God to comfort us and steady us and strengthen us to face life again. In the 1300's, Julian of Norwich wrote, "It is profitable for some souls to experience these alterations of mood--sometimes to be comforted and sometimes to fail and to be left to themselves. God wills that we know that he keeps us ever equally safe, in woe as in well-being."

And I think Jeremiah would agree.

The Elusiveness of Originality

It's Christmas break!

Moving on, I've been thinking a little bit lately about just how difficult it is to think or do or say anything that is truly original. The world has been around a pretty long time. And there have been many, many people that are smarter and more talented and more creative than I am. So chances are, nothing I do is going to be something that a million others haven't already done. For example, a couple posts ago I wrote about my theory on time and about how time seems to move faster as we get older because it's a smaller percentage of our lives. Probably not a groundbreaking concept, but not a bad idea, I think. In the following several days, I was informed by two people (Jackie and Tom) that they too had thought about this. So if two of my five readers have already had this same idea, I can safely assume that 40% of the world's population has thought the same thing. So my theory on time is less original than eating turkey on Thanksgiving.

Also, our freshman year, Charlie wrote a line for a paper that was something along the lines of "Jesus was crucified for our salvation and resurrected for our hope." It's a good quote. Really good, actually. So I jokingly questioned that Charlie had thought of it himself. When we googled it, we found that someone else had already said pretty much the exact same thing. Now I really don't think that Charlie stole the sentence. Someone had just unfortunately beat him to the punch.

However, there are some people that truly do come up with original ideas and who are genuinely creative in a way the world has never seen before. At some point, Eli Whitney had to sit down and invent the cotton gin. Beethoven had to write his symphonies. Dave Thomas had to create square hamburger patties. These people were pioneers. Whereas I recycle decades-old ideas on my blog, they brought something new and fresh to society. So to all you writers, artists, musicians, inventors, and everyone else that churn out original ideas: I salute you. I mean, without you, television would just be filled with the same, ridiculous reality dating shows where one dude dates twenty women until he eliminates all but one.

Oh wait. I guess that's really all that's on TV. My bad.

Gimp

I hurt my knee playing basketball last week. I've had to tell the story a lot over the past few days, so I'm going to put it up here so that I won't have to later tell it again to my five readers. I played basketball last Monday, which was fine, but the next day my right knee felt really tight, but it didn't really inhibit anything I was doing. On Wednesday it felt a little better, so I played basketball again, and when we were almost done, I was on defense and tried to change direction. My knee decided that would be a good time to stop supporting my body, and it basically gave out on me and I went tumbling to the hardwood. It thereafter swelled up like a grapefruit and hurt and made it difficult to walk or do anything that required bending it. I saw our athletic trainer on Thursday, but she said that it was too swollen to really be able to tell what I did, so I'm seeing her again on Tuesday and we'll go from there. However, it is feeling significantly better now that it was at first, and I'm getting around a ton better. It only gives me real problems in certain activities, like getting in or out of a car or putting on my socks or sitting in a bathroom stall.

Now that that's all cleared up, there are a few things that I've been thinking about due to my bum leg. First, I've come to appreciate much more some of the things that I have. Way too often, I complain to myself or sometimes others about things I would change about myself. I mean, I wouldn't mind being a little stronger or having better eyesight or less puffy hair or being a better dance or less awkward around people. But I can usually walk alright, and I guess that's something to be thankful for, because there's a lot of people in the world that can't. I'm fortunate to generally be in good health, and never again will I complain about having to walk all the stairs on Ozark's campus, because at least I can walk them pain-free and without having to take one slow step at a time.

Also, I've come to realize how nice people around here are to injured friends. Not that they're only nice to others when they are hurt, but they are pretty nice in general, and I'm very thankful for that. Although it is imperfect, the community at Ozark really blows me away at times, and the last week has been such a time. Especially at first when I was hobbling around like I had a peg-leg, everyone was asking how I was doing and if I needed them to carry my lunch tray or get me a refill or drive me up the hill or whatever. And I usually didn't need anything. I mean, I could get from my seat to the soda machine and back without collapsing, but it was still encouraging that everyone was so willing to help me out. Also, I had a ton of people offering me all sorts of painkillers and other pills. So I guess I also go to a school full of drug-pushers.

Where these to realizations are connected, I guess, is that I really do have a lot to be thankful for. I have health and ability and resources that so many people in the world lack, and it would be awfully terrible of me to take them for granted. I'm also surrounded by tons of incredible people who really love others and want to serve Christ, and that is always an encouraging thing. Hopefully, however, it doesn't take another demolished joint for me to recognize the good things I have. I've learned all the lessons I care to learn by such object lessons.